


This be the 'Verse

by shiva_goddessof



Category: Firefly, Serenity (2005)
Genre: Character Study, Daddy Issues, Edging, F/M, Family, Gen, Identity Issues, Late Night Conversations, Malspeak is hard, Orgasm Delay/Denial, Pregnancy, Sex, everyone in a Joss show has daddy issues, post-BDM
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-30
Updated: 2020-12-17
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:01:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 16,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25615522
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shiva_goddessof/pseuds/shiva_goddessof
Summary: Doc is everything a rich boy from the Core should be, and yet he just won't lie down and be that boy, keeps throwing himself against the world like one day he'll win.Simon and Kaylee get careless, and Simon tries to figure out who the hell he is when all the family he has in the 'verse is aboard Serenity.
Relationships: Kaylee Frye & Malcolm Reynolds, Kaylee Frye/Simon Tam, Malcolm Reynolds & Simon Tam, River Tam & Simon Tam
Comments: 2
Kudos: 23





	1. a girl you love right

**Author's Note:**

> TW for Ch1: discussion of termination of pregnancy.

It’s been quiet for about a half hour now. Quiet and still. Jayne’s slouched off to his bunk like the gorram lump he is. Ain’t seen Kaylee all evening, odd, that, she’s been off lately. Little Albatross is asleep somewhere. Autopilot’s flying, nobody needs to sit up, but some nights the stars are the only company he’s in the mood for. 

Serenity breathes different when it’s quiet. When it’s noisy, it’s noisy all to hell, all those steel walls and heavy crates and gorram lumps with loud voices and big boots ringing off of each other. At night, when it’s real quiet and the last person up turns off the light in the mess, she breathes too. Slow and deep like the girl she is, a strong girl, a good girl. She keeps going, only for she’s loved, and a girl you love right won’t ever let you down.

Clank of the hatch on one of the crew bunks, and he turns his head just a little, listening out. It don’t take long on a ship like this before you know whose footsteps are whose, and he’s half-expecting Zoe to want some company tonight. Sleep’s not what it used to be. But no - it’s a man’s footsteps, ain’t Jayne, lighter. The Doc. Biding his time in Kaylee’s bunk. Hesitates at the door to the bridge like he ain’t sure he wants to come in after all. Sits down in his sister’s seat like it’s gonna snap jaws on him.

“Captain.”

“Doctor.”

The boy doesn’t say anything for a good ten minutes. He’s slouched to the side, studying the toes of his boots like they’re his own personal salvation. Good boots, workboots, with some proper scuff on ‘em. Mal can still remember when he wore those polished citified things all the time. What a gorram dandy. He doesn’t miss that kid.

He extends legs under the control, puts his hands behind his head. Silent company is better than chatty, but he wants to get back to listening to his girl and the stars. “Something on your mind, doctor?” he says, mildly enough.

Boy lifts his eyes, finally, and looks at him square. “Um. Yes. You could say that. Yes.”

Don’t seem like he can get any further than that, though. “Spit it out, then.”

The doc keeps his cool most often, you can rely on him for that. Takes getting real riled up before he’ll raise his voice, even. He’s tried to be calm this evening, tried to freeze himself into it, but you only need to see his hand on the arm of the co-pilot’s chair to know it’s thin ice. “It’s about Kaylee.”

Oh, shiny. More _fàng pì_ from the ship’s new set of lovebirds. “I don’t intend to go over this again. Kaylee’s my crew, she answers to me, and I don’t take too kind to you interferin’. You stay on this boat, you answer to my rules; you oughtta know that by now. Kaylee ain’t too shy to speak for herself if she’s got too much work.”

“It’s not that. Not really.” Boy studies his boots some more, then decides that it’s time to fall on his sword. He swings his head up and says it quiet-like. “She’s pregnant.”

So that’s why they call it blind fury; that one sears up his spine until his vision actually whites out for a second. “ _Wángbādàn_. You been ruttin’ five minutes and you’ve got her in trouble? You, a doctor? You good-for-nothing _jībái_! You should know better!” Somewhere, a part of his brain notes that he’s sounding a lot like his own grandam.

He’s flinching, it’s there in the twitch of his eyes and those white knuckles, but he’s holding firm, won’t drop his eyes. “Can we do this without yelling? She’s sleeping.”

Mal reconsiders any and all airlock-related thoughts; hauls his voice back in with an effort. “So what’re you telling me for? Congratulations, your man-parts work? This ain’t a boy’s game.”

“I am _not a boy_.” The eyes are narrowed; his colour is climbing. Doc flushes like a girl, it’s another thing you can rely on him for; all that fair skin, hardly marked even but for the two bullets. 

“A real man wouldn’t’a done this! Get a girl that way, go on his merry and leave her stranded! Or maybe,” he says, with a laugh that bubbles up like acid, “you shoulda just solved the problem for her. Ain’t that what you’d do? That’s how a rich boy from the Core solves his problems, got the meds on hand, and everything just goes away. No little _zázhǒng_ Tams to worry things up!”

“Why do you hate me so much?” the boy asks, and credit to him, he sounds truly curious. “You asked me to stay, you gave me the job. If you think I’d do that, why am I here?”

It’s not a hard question, truth be told. Doc is everything a rich boy from the Core should be, and yet he just won’t lie down and be that boy, keeps throwing himself against the world like one day he’ll win. Won’t learn to say “ain’t”, won’t ruttin’ give up. “I’ve thought on that my own self many a time. You know your job, Doc, and you do your job well. But you don’t come in my house and do wrong to me and mine and expect me to take it lyin’ down. Did you want my approval or some-such? You ain’t gettin’ it!”

They’re both speaking in tight low voices now; even Mal has no desire to have this conversation overhead. Boy licks his dry lips, shoots a glance at the bridge door. “Did you really think I’d do that,” he says, flat.

“I think you shoulda considered it! This ain’t no time or place!”

“We were… not as careful as we should’ve been,” he admits, and the flush is back, right to his hair. “But that’s not what she wants. Not what I want.”

(Fumbled for the bedside table: “We should - “ and she shook her head on the pillow and gasped, “No,”, and he panted “But - we - “, and she tightened her arms: “We’re alive, we’re here, I don’t want nothing between us”, and he groaned - )

He’s down to earth with a bump; his girl. His bright copper girl. He rubs his face. “How’s she doing?”

Kid rakes his hand through his hair, drops his head back hard on the seat. Sighs. “She’s tired. Nauseous. Can’t keep much down. I gave her something for the nausea. Dehydrated, a bit, but if it gets any worse I can hang an IV-”

He cuts the damn fool off. “How long?”

“About eight weeks.” The boy is back to watching him carefully. “I scanned her, everything looks healthy. There’s a... a heartbeat.”

A baby. A little one. A real person; a wound, a weak spot. “So why are you tellin’ me? Coulda kept it quiet a mite longer. I coulda lived with not knowing.”

Doc scrubs his hands through his hair again, over his face; this is the part that’s really costing him. He puts a hand over his eyes. “You need to get her other medical care,” he says. “At least, at least for the… birth, and for late on. If anything goes wrong… I can’t be the doctor and the… the father. I just can’t.”

“So you make it so it don’t,” Mal says, rough. “Do your job.”

“It’s not that simple,” he says, his voice less level than he’d clearly like. “It can go bad so quickly. You must know that, Mal. You must’ve seen…”

Mal doesn’t want to know, but he knows. He knows. He remembers them, cousins, wives of the ranch hands, women from the township on Shadow. Young strong women with strong backs built in the fields and bulging bellies, women who laid down for childbed and never got back up. Funeral processions with only two pallbearers. Women weeping in kitchens, shushing each other. His throat feels clogged. “Don’t you give me a gorram lecture. And _you did that to Kaylee_. You did it.”

“I’ve saved your life more than once.” Doc’s not missing a thing, damn him. “You have two ears because of me. If you don’t already know what I’ll do for someone I care about, how far I’ll go, what the hell am I doing here, Mal?”

The anger is back, like the Doc just leaned across and switched it on. “You gonna step up?” he demands, and it’s not until he’s up that he realises that he’s standing, out of the pilot’s chair in a way to have it fair across the room were it not bolted down. “You gonna be the man?”

The kid is on his feet too, and he’s well and truly lost that citified cool. “Yes!”

“You gonna marry her?”

“Yes!” he yells, and he has the look of someone who just heard what’s come out of his mouth. He collects himself, looks back at his boots for a second, and says at about a third the volume, “Yes. If it’s what she wants.”

Well, that’s taken the wind from his sails. “Well,” he says snidely. “Ain’t that pretty. But what’s gonna happen when you gotta take River off again? Leave her high and dry? We all know who you’re choosin’, things go south.”

For a second, he thinks the boy will really hit him. The impulse flickers right along his arm, in tensing muscle; gets to his knuckles, and gets dissipated into the chair. He looks seasick instead. “River is growing up,” he says, reluctantly. “She’s happy here, she can help you. She stays with me as long as I can, but If I have to… I stay with Kaylee. And the - the baby.”

“What’s’a matter,” Mal goads, little needles under the skin, “made it, but you can’t say it?”

“I stay with Kaylee.” Boy meets his eyes. “And the baby.”

“So let me get this straight. You put Kaylee in harm's way, again, and now I gotta fix it for you, and on top of that I gotta miss out on jobs. Again. All so you can play at being the man for once. That’s special, Dr. Tam, really special.”

Looked at close up, which to be truthful he’s tried not to do since the engine room became a no-go zone, the boy looks more wretched than he’d thought. He’s not the prissy, tight-wound thing that came aboard at Persephone months back; he’s sold or traded the fancy clothes, put on some useful muscle, and he holds himself a little different, somehow, since the joyous union with Kaylee, but whatever ease he’s found has deserted him right now. He’s pale and dark-shadowed, swallowing hard, and his hands, normally neat as you please, are a mess. “I’m asking you to support her,” he says, after a long moment of inner struggle. “She deserves that.”

“Takin’ care of a little one ain’t easy. It’s not takin’ care of a nearly grown sister, odd though she might be. You thought this through?”

The kid sniffs; rubs angrily at his eyes. “This is not how things should have been,” he says, so quietly that Mal almost doesn’t hear him over the hum of the ship. “She should have… she should have had what I could have given her. A ring. Two of the best doctors. More time… I’m not a rich boy from the Core, Mal. I haven’t been for a long time. I’m a broke ‘fugee with a side in crime and a crazy sister who can’t ever settle anywhere. All I have is what I am. And she has me. And that’s what she wants.”

“What she wants,” Mal repeats, almost stunned. His hand goes for his empty holster.

“She’s not a child,” he says, low and angry again, that hard quiet anger he uses on Jayne. “She’s a woman, and she knows what she wants. And these are our lives. Ours, Mal. We’re going to be happy while we can.”

A baby. A real person. Zoe was born Vesselside, grew up shipboard. Maybe it’s not as impossible as he might’ve thought. Maybe. A new thing. A life... He sits down heavily. “Why didn’t she tell me herself?”

Doc cracks a half-smile and folds likewise; he looks like his knees wouldn’t’ve held out much longer. “She was petrified. She’s cried and cried… She just couldn’t face you.”

His girl. His bright girl, the heart of Serenity. They’re so young, both of them; so young. He scratches at his face. “Tell her… tell her it’ll be shiny. We’ll find a way. A baby, it’s, it’s a new start, isn’t it? A new thing. Tell her… you’ll get your doctor. Li-Sheng had a few on his books, worked quiet-like… I’ll figure it out.”

“I have some credits saved,” the boy says anxiously. “I’ll pay for it.”

“You hand me your _lè sè_ money, Doc, and I will give you a third bullet hole. Are we done?”

The doc heaves himself out of the chair and wobbles to the door, with the shake of used-up adrenaline he can’t quite hide. “Yes.”

“Good. Get out.”

The kid pauses at the door for a while; Mal can feel him studying the back of his head. “Thank you,” he says, at length.

“Ain’t doing it for you,” Mal says, and puts his boots up on the console.

The kid watches him watch the stars for a long moment more. “I never thought you were,” he says, and shuts the door.


	2. Thrilling Heroics

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “The life coming is green,” River says confidently. “Green like a shoot. It’s growing well, and its negative manifestations are apologised for.”
> 
> Simon drops his fork.
> 
> “What did she say?” says Zoe.

He finds Kaylee in the engine room the next morning, and lingers just a bit in the doorway, watching her. She’s indeed pale, a mite paler than he’d like, but she’s working on her girl and she’s absorbed and resolute. She has a bowl from the kitchen tucked into the corner, and he can’t quite figure out why until he - _oh_. Guess the doc weren’t lying. 

He clears his throat. “Kaylee, girl. Something you’ve not been tellin’ me?”

Her face wilts into tears at once. “Oh Cap’n,” she wails, “I’m so sorry! I been wantin’ to, and I just couldn’t -”

“Well, your boyfriend did the deed.” He winces, and adds, “Again.”

She nods, sniffling, and it’s about all he can bear. He folds her into a bear hug, and she gulps and hiccups herself into some kind of calm against his shoulders, pushing at her messy hair with restless hands. 

Finally, she pushes back and raises her watery eyes to him. “Thanks, cap’n. You didn’t - you weren’t too hard on him, were ya?”

“No harder’n he deserved. He still has all his limbs.” He makes a mock-stern face at her; she cuffs his shoulder lightly. More seriously, he says, “ _Xiǎo mèi mei_ , you sure this is what you want?”

She bites her trembling lip. “It ain’t nothin’ we were lookin’ for, Cap, but we been talkin’, and - well - what other time’s gonna be different?” She looks down at her own body, and says shyly, “Beside, you know I always wanted babies. And he’s bein’ so - so sweet to me. You don’t know…”

“He has a call to be,” he says soberly, and she flares up at once, with her little fists and her wide-open face.

“Now don’t you be blamin’ this on him, Cap’n. He told me - he tried to get me to keep care, but I wouldn’t hear him. We were so - so glad to be alive, and it just…”

Why do they have to give him the _details_?

“He’s a doctor, and it’s his place to be rememberin’ that.”

“He’s not just a doctor, Cap’n,” she says softly.

A small part of him wants very much to be away from this conversation, and dealing with the seventeen other problems that have to be dealt with between now and Hephaeston. “Little one, I told your boy that we’d make this work, find a way to get you what you need. But no more surprises, no secrets, _dong ma_? And get that EC workin’ right before we all boil in our beds.”

“ _Lǐjiě_ ,” she agrees quietly. “But, Cap’n… you won’t tell anyone? I just - I ain’t ready, I got to…”

“I’ll hold it back long’s I can.” He turns for the door. “But Kaylee, things got to change around here, with this. People will be findin’ out, and they may have some things to say. And no leavin’ the ship, all right? I don’t want you out on no milkrun even, not ‘less it’s the safest place in the ‘Verse and you well behind me and Zoe and Jayne.”

“I know it,” she agrees, getting ready to crawl back under the bulk of the engine - and _wǒ de mā_ , there’s another problem storing up for the future, who’s going to do the work when she don’t fit?

“I mean it. Anything happen to you and your cargo there, I got to look at the Doc’s face the rest of his life, and truth be told - “ he makes a silly face - “that ain’t doin’ me a world of good already.”

Her face is bright with an inner light, and he thinks he’s understood why until he sees her touch the wall of the ship. “My cargo,” she says softly. “Yeah, I guess so. Got to be like her and carry safe.”

\-------------------------------------------

Days meld, sometimes, for all his efforts to keep them disciplined and clear. Smuggling job to legitimate freight to payroll heist, concussions and laser burns and infected stab wounds. Not that he wants anything more complex just now. There’s enough to think about.

Beylix to Beaumonde to Ezra, coming off a cargo drop, going to meet a buyer. Breakfast on just another day in the Black. Once he thought maybe this life would just keep going, keep recirculating with minor variations until something got good and messed up enough to throw them off track, but now there’s a living clock ticking, counting down, somewhere below the surface of perception most of the daytime but always there at nights. It’s been three weeks maybe since he spoke to Mal, and Simon is surprised and grateful and queasily aware that he’s yet to say anything to anyone other than Kaylee, and despite his full and justified expectation of a kicking, Mal is doing no worse than watching him a bit more closely than is habitual.

Zoe has kitchen duty this morning, thankfully. He’s been covering Kaylee’s shifts as often as he thinks he can get away with, lying that they’ve traded for laundry or maintenance; she’s doing better, the dimenhydrimate shots have pushed back the worst of the nausea, but mornings are the worst, he knows. There’s not much talking, much to discuss; another day betweentimes, to be filled with activity both meaningful and meaningless, each his place and his toys. He quietly makes a cup of ginger tea, slips it to Kaylee; she wraps her fingers around it gratefully, they squeeze hands below the table. The rest of the crew take no notice; his little attentions to Kaylee long predate their sleeping together. Another small thing to be grateful for. His own plans for the day are modest; spend a few hours following Kaylee’s directions in the engine room, so she can lie still in the hammock and point him right, then some research. River sits down across from him, and he smiles at her absently, his mind busy with the obstetrics textbook he’d managed to find on their stop on Athens a few days ago. This, he comes to realise much, much later, is probably what set her off in the first place.

“The life coming is green,” River says confidently. “Green like a shoot. It's growing well, and its negative manifestations are apologised for.”

Simon drops his fork.

“What did she say?” says Zoe.

“The manifestation of life,” says River, confidingly. “Its gestation.” She looks full at Kaylee. “The complexity is growing, and the pattern is fractal, it’s exponential, still simple, but I can hear him now, and I thought you’d…”

“Is she meanin’ what I’m…” says Zoe slowly, staring at Kaylee.

“Kaylee..?” says Inara, shifting out of her chair.

All of them are staring. Kaylee’s face is white and shocked. She opens her mouth, then closes it again, helplessly. He knows he must look like a deer in headlights himself, and that it couldn’t be clearer to anyone watching that both he and she know exactly what River is talking about.

“She’s sayin’ that you’re - “ says Zoe through stone lips.

“Kaylee, how could you not - “ says Inara, sounding hurt.

A tear is rolling down Kaylee’s face now; she shakes her head back and forth, once, then again, her eyes fixed open and staring.

“Can’t a man have some gorram - “ Jayne growls.

“ - the pattern was just so clear, and the resonant frequencies - “ says River beseechingly.

“ _Enough._ ” Simon’s voice is a whip-crack; the cold, diamond-hard tone trained into him to take control in an emergency. He points a finger at River. “No, River, stop, no more. Just stop. I am taking Kaylee out of here - “ he stands - “and then the rest of you can take it out on _me_.”

River’s lip is trembling; he has never, ever used that tone on her before. He pushes it away and helps Kaylee up. She seems almost paralysed, but her limbs move with his gentle encouragement, and he gets her standing and supported by his arm. “Come on, Kaylee, _ai ren_ , we gotta go,” he says softly. “We’re going back to your bunk, let’s go…” He gets her up the steps, like a sleepwalker, and kicks open the hatch to her bunk, where he’s spent more nights than his own room lately, climbs down the ladder and lifts her bodily down in his arms. She clings to him tightly, taking gasping breaths, but the tears aren’t coming. He lays her down in her bunk again, covers her gently. She closes her eyes, keeps taking sobbing breaths in and out. He smoothes her hair. “Kaylee, I’ll be back soon, okay? I’m going to make this right.” She opens her eyes and catches his as she nods, biting her lip against a sob. He kisses her forehead.

The table is more or less as he left it; Jayne is eating, Mal is surveying the scene with crossed arms from the head of the table. Everyone else is awkwardly looking or not looking at one another, breakfast abandoned in front of them. River’s eyes are as big as galaxies; she looks so painfully like the little girl he remembers, when she’d go too far in a game and make him so mad he’d walk away. He walks back to his own place and Kaylee’s, crosses his arms, sighs. “Okay.”

“So Kaylee is pregnant,” Zoe says from the far end of the table, and the chill radiating off her is so palpable that he can’t meet her eye.

He rubs at his forehead, where a wicked headache is rapidly developing. “Yes.”

“By you,” says Inara, sounding a shade doubtful. Simon pinches the bridge of his nose and decides to indulge himself by losing his temper.

“ _Wǒ de tiān a_ , who ELSE?” he barks, and Inara jumps visibly. There are a few seconds of ghastly silence, and she says very quietly, “I’m sorry.”

“How long?” says Zoe. 

“Still six or seven months to go.” He drops his arms, leans on the back of Kaylee’s abandoned chair.

“Why weren’t we told of this, sir?” says Zoe, steely, dark red. “I can see that you knew.”

“Oh, _zhe zhen shi ge kuaile de jinzhan _,” says Mal dryly, unfolding his arms. “Weren’t mine to tell.”__

__“There was sadness growing in the walls,” says River pleadingly. “She, she, she thought that they would want to know that there are opposing forces, that they -”_ _

__“River,” he says, although it pains him. “No.”_ _

__A collective silence comes to centre on Jayne, who looks up, scowls, and wipes his mouth. “Aw, hell. What y’all lookin’ at me for? Kaylee’s been wantin’ the doc’s baby all up in her ‘long with all his other stuff since he step foot on this boat. I’m s’posed to be surprised she gone’n managed it?”_ _

__A little flame sweeps across his nerve endings as he listens, but it’s squelched as Jayne adds with relish, “Wouldn’t have thought the doc’d be up to the job, though.”_ _

__He suddenly feels infinitely weary; pulls out his abandoned chair and sinks into it. “As we’ve established, Jayne,” and his voice sounds tired and worn, but no worse, “the ways in which you’re wrong about me are infinite.”_ _

__“‘Long’s I ain’t wrong about breakfast,” says Jayne, reaching across the table with his fork to snag Kaylee’s abandoned plate. Simon slaps his hand away, and the fork goes pinwheeling across the room, hitting the floor with a jangle between River and Inara. He pushes his own plate roughly across the table at Jayne, and puts his head in his miraculously steady hands._ _

__“But this is serious,” says Inara. “We’ll all have to - “_ _

__“I’m not babysittin’” says Jayne, gleefully._ _

__“ - No,” he says, pushing the chair back again. “No, no, no, no. Nobody asked any of you for anything. This is not your responsibility, nobody asked you for help. It’s my baby. Kaylee’s baby. Not yours, not anyone else’s. Our family. No.”_ _

__“That’s not the way it works on my boat, Doctor,” says Mal, getting to his feet. “You’re gonna need - “_ _

__“Don’t play the patriarch with me, Mal! You don’t get to do that!” To his shame and consternation, he is weeping; Mal has dissolved into a blur of brown and red. “I got rid of one already, I do not need another!”_ _

__Mal is a close presence, leather and sweat and gun-oil; a heavy hand claps onto his shoulder. “You need to understand, Doctor Tam,” his voice says, sounding almost friendly, “a man who’s gonna be a father - he needs to know when to sit down and take his ease.” Mal kicks the chair behind him into his knees, with vicious efficiency. Simon moans, and pitches forward onto the table like a gunshot victim._ _

__“Enough now,” says Mal’s voice, from the door to the foredeck. “Everyone knows what needs to be known. We’ll talk about this another time. I ‘spect most of you have jobs to be doin’ with. Zoe, I need you on the bridge. Jayne, go and stack the cargo properly. Inara, I imagine you have somethin’ of use you could be doing somewhere.” There is a pause, and then he says, not unkindly, “Little ‘Tross, look to your brother.”_ _

__Simon stays pitched forward on the table, his eyes shut. The weave of the placemat will, he knows, be marked on his face when he gets up; the wood of the table is sticky against his temple and cheek. The desire to put a wall of unconsciousness between the crew of the _Serenity_ and the wreckage of his privacy, the naked frailty of his hopes, is so strong that it’s like a narcotic. He hears a rustle of movement, and a small scented hand lands on his shoulder. Inara says softly, “Simon, I’m so sorry for my clumsiness. It’s happy news for you, and for Kaylee. If I can help you in any way…”_ _

__He has no words to give her, but he fumbles a hand up to grasp hers and squeeze, the merest acknowledgement of thanks._ _

__Then it’s he and River, brother and sister, alone again as ever. She reaches across the table to tentatively touch his hair, and he finds it in himself to lift his hand and hold hers._ _

__“Simon, I’m sorry,” she says, small. “I, I, I get so confused. I thought, there was the sadness, and his blood was singing to your blood, and I thought they would be happy. I thought they would want to talk to him.”_ _

__“It’s not your fault, River,” he says, his eyes still shut. “You only said what was true, I should have talked to you, of course you knew, I should have said…”_ _

__“It was the resonant frequencies,” she says, her eyes still big. “There are connections, between the cytosine and the guanine…”_ _

__A rusty, bitter laugh bubbles up in him, something stuck in blocked pipes. “Right. My sister. Who needs a genetic laboratory?” His mind realises what his ears have been hearing; he raises his head and opens his eyes. “He?”_ _

__Eyes fixed on his, she nods solemnly._ _

__“Well.” He clears his throat. “Well. That’s. Thank you. Well.” His voice is stuck._ _

__“Do I put you to bed?” Her face is anxious. “Do you give yourself a smoother?”_ _

__“I think we do the dishes,” he says slowly. “I don’t think Zoe is coming back, so… dishes. But I need to take this to Kaylee first.” He scoops up the remains of her abandoned oatmeal and the rapidly-cooling ginger tea. She will have heard every word of this, he knows, unless she has mercifully fallen asleep; she needs to hear him say the same thing he’s going to say to River._ _

__He looks back from the doorway. “It’s going to be okay, _mèimei_. We’re going to be okay.”_ _

__“But only if we do the dishes,” she says, confidently, and something cold in his chest releases. He laughs, turns again. “Right. Dishes. Right.”_ _


	3. Hand-me-downs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “What about your folks?” she says carefully, and that’s it, he can tell. The snick of the trap.
> 
> “What about them.”
> 
> “I want to see a picture of them. Do you got one?”

“Simon?”

“Mmmm?” He’s reading a journal, propped up on one elbow - a recent issue of the System Journal of Trauma Medicine, one he managed to download through one of the useful, illegal Cortex back channels they have occasional access to. He still doesn’t think it’s a good idea for too many medical and surgical journals to come up tagged to a Firefly-class ship. There’s a paper in this one about new techniques for managing laser burns, and he’s been looking forward to it all day. His other hand rests absently on the warm rise of Kaylee’s belly, over which her shirts are beginning to ride up. (The truth is that the change in her body - the evidence of what his body has done to hers, the visible mark he’s left on it - makes him absurdly, embarrassingly hot. He’s fairly sure he shouldn’t be having these thoughts about the mother of his child, and not sure how to explain this to her. He is, however, very sure he doesn’t want River explaining it for him, so he tries to avoid being in the same room with both of them. River was only fourteen when she went into the Academy, and she doesn’t seem to have moved on much emotionally since then - he’s unclear how many of his thoughts about Kaylee River is even equipped to process, and finds it increasingly important to avoid thinking about it.)

Kaylee shifts carefully over until she’s facing him, and there’s a look on her face he’s coming to recognise. She’s had something on her mind for days, and it seems her trap is ready to spring.

“Do you got any captures of you and River? I mean, from when you were younger?”

Simon admits defeat and closes his reader. “Not really. When I left…” he trails off, wondering how to summarise the chain of events that ended with him and River in the belly of a ship, being taken to a safehouse on Persephone, “I only had what I could carry. And I thought I’d get to see her instead, for the first time in years. I didn’t let myself think that we wouldn’t get her out.”

“There’s one, though, ain’t there?” She gives him her disconcerting straight look.

“...Have you been going through my stuff?”

“...Yes,” she admits. “And you can be mad at me later. But I want to know. I want to know what you looked like…”

She is going somewhere with this, he knows, and he’s annoyed already, but he’s really been trying to indulge her, give her what she needs, lately. He gets up and digs out the capture, from the meagre stock of personal possessions he brought with him when her bunk became their bunk. (Awful as the scene at breakfast was, weeks back, it’s left them in a different place, together and with the crew; somehow it’s accepted that they’re a unit now. Zoe offered up the bed from her bunk, and Kaylee wouldn’t touch it, said she wouldn’t sleep in Zoe and Wash’s marriage bed, so in the end, Zoe took Kaylee’s old bed, and he paid for a new one out of what was left over from his share of the Lassiter.) It’s a formal portrait, taken when he was perhaps ten; there was usually one a year, and they didn’t differ enough in his memory to be distinguishable. But River is a sweet-faced, round-eyed toddler, with half-grown curls, clutching at his hand, in one of the starched party dresses his mother favoured. He doesn’t know why or how he ended up with just this capture particularly - there were others, much more recent, ones he liked more. 

Why does he dread Kaylee seeing this so much? He is so afraid that she will see only the expensive clothing, the opulent background, the programmed smiles, and that he will never be able to make her understand the texture of his life then.

He looks at the picture. A slight, gawky boy, dipping his head shyly, with an awkward smile, the one that always got him cuffed and told to stand up straight. The mock-adult suits, copies of his father’s, that he was never allowed to sit down in because they creased; he hated them at the time, itchy and heavy, and only years later, in his teens, began to appreciate the effect they had on the people around him. River is squealing with laughter, pulling at his hand. It feels at the same time like someone else’s life and like a memory that he could step back into at any moment.

“Oh,” says Kaylee softly. “Oh, you both look so sweet. She must’ve adored you, look… Did your hair get darker, you got bigger?”

“Some.” He is not enjoying this. 

“What was it like then?” She’s watching him closely. “You and River?”

He sighs, rolls onto his stomach. “I know most people don’t get me and River. Even you… Not many brothers and sisters are that close. I know. And I’m almost ten years older than her… It doesn’t make sense to anyone.”

“So tell me,” she says, with some steel.

He folds his arms, buries his face in them briefly. “It was… It was just me, for a really long time. I mean, I went to school, but I wasn’t allowed to see most of the other kids outside school, and my parents were always busy… And then there was River. She just followed me everywhere. And once she could talk, she was so advanced, she talked to me like she was my age… She could make up these stories, these games, and they were so weird and so funny… she always got me. I was too old to be playing with her like I did, but, I don’t know, she always had something new, something unexpected, she challenged me… she made me laugh. We used to just run wild, in the house and on the estate… Everything I did, she found a way to be part of. She helped me study for every exam, right up until I left for MedAcad… After I left, she waved me every day for two months. My friends used to make fun of me, oh, your little sister can’t live without you...”

“It sounds so pretty,” she says, almost wistfully. 

“Then I’m not telling it right.” He resists the childish impulse to roll with his back to her. 

“What about your folks?” she says carefully, and that’s it, he can tell. The snick of the trap.

“What about them.”

“I want to see a picture of them. Do you got one?”

His choices, at this point, are to play along, or to stomp out of the room. “No.”

“But there are pictures on the Cortex, ain’t there? Them bein’ such prominent citizens?” She casts her eyes down, and says, almost defiantly. “I thought about lookin’ without tellin’ you, but - it don’t seem fair.”

“Kaylee.” He sits up. “Why do you want this.”

“Because I do,” she says with force.

He feels very much like crying or vomiting, but he has even less strength for the explanation of why than he does just to give her what she wants. He gets his terminal; runs a Cortex search for “gabriel and regan tam”, and chooses the writeup from some charity ball or other, steadfastly ignoring the third result down which reads “Prominent Executive Gabriel Tam Denounces Fugi…” It’s just another carefully posed shot in eveningwear; his stomach twists less than he’d expected.

“Oh, your momma’s a beauty,” says Kaylee, tracing a finger over the photo. “River takes after her, don’t she? The dark eyes, and all that hair…”

“Yeah,” he says shortly.

“But you…” her finger shifts to Gabriel Tam’s heavy dark head. “You look like your daddy.”

Simon turns his face away. His voice is careful. “So I’ve always been told.”

Kaylee grabs his chin. “Why you gotta do that, Simon?” She sounds genuinely angry. “Just why?”

“Why what?” he echoes, baffled. Not for the first time, being with Kaylee feels like groping through a pitch-black room, one in which objects are constantly tripping him or hitting him in the gut. For all that sex has done to bridge the gap, to give him a language he can’t be misunderstood in, what she wants from him is so radically _different_ from anything anyone else has ever wanted.

“Why you gotta be like that?” she demands. “Like we’re at, I dunno, some fancy party talkin’ about what they got on the buffet? You don’t got to _do_ that with me! I hate it!”

He crawls out of bed, begins fishing for his discarded pyjama pants in the mess of their bunk; this is not a discussion he can have naked. “Kaylee, I don’t understand what you _want_. You wanted to see the pictures, I showed you! Can’t you just leave it alone?”

“Why you gotta pretend like you don’t hate this?” she exclaims, with fire. “I know it’s rough for you, talkin’ bout your folks, I know you feel bad ‘bout it! But your folks is your folks! You can’t pretend like they don’t exist!”

“What else should I do?” He’s found his clothes, struggles into them hastily. “They disowned me, disowned us both! Far as they’re concerned, they’re not my parents any more!”

“But they _are_!” She’s scrambled half to her feet as well. “They’re part of you, River too! You ain’t forgotten.”

Simon is trembling with fury. He turns around to climb the ladder.

“Where are you going?”

“Back to the passenger dorm.” He pulls the hatch open. “I’m done with this.”

Kaylee catches at the leg of his pants and pulls, hard. “You don’t get to walk out on me, Simon Tam! You ain’t a coward, I know it, now act like it!”

He hates fighting in these bunks; it’s like fighting at the bottom of a bottle. He can’t pace without tripping over something; the only space is the air above, space to fill with regrettable words, and ears on every side, listening. 

“What do you want me to say?” he yells. “What will it take for you to drop this? That I hate them, that I can’t believe they sold us out? That they never loved us?”

“The truth,” she spits back. “That you think ‘bout them, that it scares you - “

“Of course it scares me! What kind of father - “ He chokes.

Kaylee has curled up at the foot of their bed watching him. “What kind of father could just let you go?” she says, almost tenderly.

Simon sobers himself. “The last time I saw him,” he says dully, “was outside the big Fed station in Capital City, on Osiris. Three years ago. I got arrested, I was in a bar in the blackout zone where there’s no surveillance, meeting a man who said he could connect me to the resistance, the ones who knew where River was. It got raided, and he bailed me out. I didn’t call him, they must have recognised my name. He said that if I ever got in trouble again, he wouldn’t help me, and I could come home with him now, or never again.”

“What did you do?” she says softly.

“I walked away from him. I went back to work, and I met with the resistance, and when we got the intel on where the Academy was, I walked away with what I had and took a shuttle to Liann Jiun. He never contacted me in all that time. Two years.”

“And your momma? She never wrote to you, or..?”

“No,” he says shortly. His throat hurts. Without noticing, he’s sat back down on the bed.

Kaylee pets him cautiously. “I’m sorry, honey. They let you down bad. I know you gotta be thinking about your daddy, you gonna be - “

“ _Stop that_.” He stands up again. “Stop telling me how I feel! I’m not him! I’m not him, and I don’t know how to do this - “ The freefall feeling of panic is back, the one he first had when Kaylee told him what she suspected; he reaches for her body, her breasts, almost frantic. “Please, can we - please…”

__“No, Simon, no!” She pushes him off with some force. “We can’t just hide that way. You gotta say what you mean!”_ _

__“Why did we do this, Kaylee?” he asks desperately. “Why did we let this happen? We were so stupid, so reckless - ”_ _

__“That’s what you gotta say to me now?” she says, her voice rising in disbelief._ _

__“I should have stopped you! Mal was right, I knew better, I should have stopped you. I just… I couldn’t make myself care - “_ _

__“Don’t make this all ‘bout you! It ain’t just about you!”_ _

__“It was too soon! We were crazy, it was too soon - we’re hurting people - “_ _

“You’re hurting _me_!” she cries. “You can’t just say that now and not - not - “ 

__“Please - “ he begs. “I don’t know what to do - I don’t know how to fix this - Kaylee, please - “  
__

__She seems to understand, somehow, something that escapes him. She takes his hand and pulls him down on the bed, facing her. She pins him down with leg and arm, pulls his head into her neck, where the carotid pulses just under her skin. The soft swell of her belly presses against him. He can feel the tremors in his body, hard, tight little tremors, passing through him and into her._ _

__Over and over again, she’s saying quietly into his hair, “Just stay, Simon. Stay here. Stay with me. Stay.”_ _


	4. Finding the edge

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Simon thinks too much and has some sex.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally earning the M rating. plot next time? maybe. maybe.

He wakes the next day restless and stiff from muscular tension. She hasn’t moved, but her eyes open as he shifts.

“I’m sorry, baby,” he says. “What I said… I’m sorry…”

“Wasn’t fair,” she says softly. “I know. But I hadda… You don’t know…”

“I wish you’d told me,” he says. “Before.”

“I hadda,” she says again. “We all been grievin’, but you was grievin’ on them too, an’ you couldn’t see clear…”

\------------------------------------

Sometimes, splashing his face, or brushing his teeth, his own reflection catches him by surprise; a sense of the absurd takes him by the throat. His hair, getting long, and he doesn’t know why he won’t let anyone cut it; his jaw, rough as many days as not now. The worn and casual clothing. The hard scar tissue just below his ribs. Learned to stalk and sidle and seek cover, rather than stride into every situation as a master of the universe. The gun on his hip, sometimes, when they go planetside, the one that Zoe is teaching him to shoot, and _cāo wǒ_ , that conversation nearly matched the one with Mal on the bridge.

(“You want to be a gun hand?” she’d said, as still and poised as ever.

“I won’t go on jobs with you. Or kill, not unless I have to,” he’d said, with discomfort. “But, whether I want to or not, it’s clear I have to have one, at times. To protect… the people I’ve got to protect. So I need to be able to use it.”

Her eyes had flickered over him, and he’d held his breath. “River don’t need much protection,” she’d said, in the end, and he met her eyes full.

“I know. But… others do.”

She’d walked on past him, already finished. “Handgun. Don’t touch anything bigger ‘till you got that down, not that piece you had at Mr. Universe’s. You hold it okay, you ain’t scared, so you just got to get the aim. Planetside only. I’ll tell you when.”)

So here he is. A stranger to himself, his once self. And a woman in his bed, a woman every day more pregnant with his child. A beautiful woman, and as brilliant in her sphere as he is in his, as he’s long known. But he also knows what he would have thought of her, had he met her in the once that was. Treated her with warmth and kindness, had she walked into his ER, and then immediately forgotten her. With polite and distant condescension, if she had fixed something for him. And he has not forgotten to realise that the baby in her is the greatest security he and River have ever had, his best defence against the loss of Serenity. Neither of the faces he expects to see in the mirror is altogether a flattering reflection.

Some tiny part of his brain still half-expects to see his mother walk into the infirmary one day: “Darling, you’ve done wonderfully. You passed, of course. Now, get your things - “ with that imperious jerk of the head - “they’re waiting for us at home.”

The only time the two halves of his skin knit together is when the blood is pumping out and someone shouts, as they do distressingly often, “Get the doc!” Then his hands are sure and his voice is steady and people jump when he speaks. Then he has clarity of purpose. He wonders how long it will hold him for.

When he can’t sleep and Kaylee is breathing like the sea far away, he plans the knocking over of the Tam estate. He can tell them exactly how to evade security, where the safes are in bedroom and study, which artworks are worth something and might be fenceable. River could do recon and take point, a ghost in the night. He can’t go, of course, he’s too recognisable, but something would go wrong, and he would have to appear. His father would be tied up in his study, not harmfully, but securely, and he would step out of the doorway, gun poised in his fist, a long moment, let him see what the Tam heir is now. A survivor, a blunt truth, a rescuer. A thief, sometimes. Half a rogue. A lover. 

Maybe he will buy a wedding ring and wear it, on his gun hand, just for that. Maybe.

Sometimes when jobs are thin he thinks of suggesting it. His inheritance and River’s, and he’d not touch a single credit of his cut. But to go that deep into the Core is still risky, and in one of his crazier moods Mal might be tickled enough at the thought of getting one over on the Corefolk to go for it. He’s said little about his and River’s parents to anyone but Kaylee, but he knows they’ve wondered. Seen the Cortex reports, even. He knows what Mal must think.

A wedding ring. He hasn’t forgotten what he said to Mal, but he hasn’t done anything either, and Kaylee’s never brought it up. He isn’t sure he can get legally married anyway; in his experience, it involves paperwork and DNA, and even on the Rim it seems unwise to be filing anything at lawhouses with the name “Simon Tam” on it. He isn’t sure he’s ready. He wouldn’t have asked yet, if it weren’t for the baby, and somehow he can’t figure out if that means he should ask because of the baby, or if he absolutely shouldn’t ask because of the baby. In the circles he grew up in, not to marry a woman who’s carrying your child is tantamount to denying paternity, or at least to declaring the relationship casual (and over). Like most things, though, he guesses it’s a little looser in the black.

It wasn’t that he hadn’t known what could happen. It wasn’t even that he hadn’t thought it would happen. It was more that it hadn’t seemed to matter at the time, somehow, not compared to pushing out the dark and the still bodies and the screams of the Reavers and the hollowness behind Zoe’s eyes at the breakfast table…

\----------------------

River’s swinging her legs absently against the cabinets of the infirmary, and humming as he draws the pale liquid up. That’s always a bad sign.

“Not going to do anything,” she says, and he winces.

“ _Mèimei_ , I really need you to not answer things I haven’t actually said.”

“Is he going to be a Tam?” she says, playing with a pair of surgical scissors he left on the counter. Clearly a mistake. He snags them back quickly.

“What?” He blinks, replays that one a few times. “Oh. I… don’t know. We haven’t talked about it… yet.”

This is more true than he would like. He and Kaylee have talked very little about what will happen after the baby comes. What they will do. It. He. River continues to insist it’s a boy, and he can’t help believing her. 

“But you want him to be,” she says, with her disconcerting straight look.

“No. I don’t really care. It doesn’t mean much to me any more, as a name.”

“Liar.” River picks at a place the linoleum is peeling. 

“Why would I lie to you? You can tell.” 

“You think about them too much,” she says to her bony knees.

“I think about everything too much. You know that.” He tries a smile. 

“They don’t deserve it.”

“Probably no one deserves all the things that’ve happened to us.” He taps the syringe carefully. “Do you remember,” he says, before he can stop himself, “when you would only speak in that language you made up for two weeks, and Dad almost spanked you for not saying thank you to ‘Uncle’ Sebastian?”

Her heel taps hard against the back of the cupboard, twice. “English and Chinese were both morally insufficient. I hated that doll anyway.”

A rush of relief. “I kind of figured that by the state it was in when you left it in my room.”

“French was too decadent. I had no choice.”

“Somehow you never seemed to, when it came to being a brat.”

“Worried I won’t let you be… Teeter-totter, in your head. Think it’s not your choice. Always have to choose.” Her voice is rising, developing that edge that chills his skin. 

“River, calm down. I’m not worried about you. I’m okay. Really.” Reassuring River is a habit much too deep to be broken by the knowledge that she can see right through him.

Her face twists; she’s looking a long, long way past him, past everything on the ship. “I would never hurt him,” she says, and she sounds like the little girl he remembers, the little girl he has to keep reminding himself she isn’t any more. “No hurt. Ever. You shouldn’t think…”

That one hits him hard. “ _Mèimei_. I’m sorry. I know you wouldn’t… I’m so sorry.”

But he’s thought about it. What will happen when his attention is permanently diverted from River. What could happen, if she doesn’t like it. He has.

There is a tear tracking down one of her cheeks, but her voice is perfectly steady. “You don’t understand the laws of physics. No physics. Too much cutting, not enough understanding. Can’t destroy. Can’t create either. Only balancing. There’s always balance. I wouldn’t upset the balance...”

“I am weak in physics,” he agrees, lifting the syringe. “Arm.”

River huffs, and shows him the vein.

\-------------------------------------

Jayne drops into his chair with the usual disgruntled growl. “So deal already. I got a thirst on.”

Mal cuts his eyes sideways and slides the bottle of engine rotgut further away. “When ain’t that true? Get your own.”

“Ha ha.” Jayne swipes the bottle and takes a swig from the neck. “Like we ain’t got enough o’ this stuff to leave half o’ your battalion blind.” He leers. “What’s left of ‘em.”

“I am goin’ to gracefully ignore that deliberate provocatation,” says Mal, with a pious face, “in favor of also encouragin’ the Doc to hurry the hell up. Ain’t you shuffled those enough yet?”

“Yes.” He deals. “Zoe’s not playing, I take it?”

“Not tonight,” Mal says, with the straightest of straight faces.

“So be it. Ante up.” He takes care to lean well across the table when he passes Jayne his cards, just for the pleasure of seeing Mal out of the corner of his eye pouring a shot of the rotgut into Simon’s beer. They still think he doesn’t notice.

“Where’s your woman, anyway?” says Jayne, making a child’s frowny face at his cards.

“Working. Where’s yours? Oh, right.”

“Jayne’s best girl is laid up with that firin’-pin trouble,” says Mal, grinning and playing a shark move at the same time.

“Can’t get nothin’ to fix her,” Jayne says plaintively. “Not on the dustballs we been landin’ on lately. Can’t we even go somewhere with a good junkyard? It ‘ud please li’l Kaylee as well, and I reckon she ain’t got so much to look forward to lately.” He giggles.

“We go where the work is,” says Mal, pushing his slips in. “Come on, Doc, you betting or what?”

“Maybe you oughtta wait for some more tips from your sister,” says Jayne.

“Yes, very useful ones, like ‘Ooh, you’ll regret that!’”. He makes his move. “I think she’s chosen to talk to Kaylee over demonstrating her family loyalty tonight.”

“Hell, I’d do the same, if I had anybody but you two to play cards with.” Jayne grabs the bottle and drinks directly again; Mal winces. He brightens: “That mean Inara’s free?”

“Free to break every one of your fingers.” Mal folds.

“I fold too. My luck isn’t in,” he says, only half lying.

“Don’t be feelin’ too sorry for yourself, Doc,” says Mal, intently studying the rips and folds in their battered set of Tall Cards. “You got two women worship the ground you walk on, and that’s two more than most men ever get.”

“I think,” he says, keeping his eyes on the table as he gathers the cards in to reshuffle, “that that is an exaggeration, in both cases. But mostly, the view from the pedestal is not as fine as you might think.”

“You can talk fancy when I’m done beatin’ you into the ground again.” Jayne sticks his bowie knife in the table and goes to rummage in the cupboards. “We got anythin’ to eat?” 

\-----------------------

He comes back from a recon and resupply trip planetside one day, made a fourth to Mal and Jayne and Zoe, mostly for muscle, the boring kind involved in lugging crates. Kaylee flies down the loading ramp at an awkward full pelt as soon as it lowers and flings herself into his arms. He catches her, not without difficulty, alarmed: “Kaylee, what happened? What’s wrong?” She’s sniffling into his front.

“Nothin’,” she says, her voice a thread. “I just got to thinkin’...” She sniffs and wipes her nose.

He’s unsettled enough to send a questioning glance to Mal over her shoulder, God knows why; Mal shrugs innocently, mimes a big belly, and makes a corkscrew gesture at his temple. “Do you need me to check you? Let’s go, come on…” He leads her into the ship, but she tugs him insistently past the infirmary, up the bay stairs and through the mess to their bunk. Apparently her business with him is emotional, not medical. She’s slower and more awkward climbing down the ladder than a few months ago, but she gets down quickly enough, waits for him to follow her, then wraps her arms round his neck again and buries her face in his shoulder.

“Kaylee.” He lifts her face towards him with a hand under her chin. “What happened?”

“Nothin’ happened.” She won’t quite meet his eyes square. “I just, I got to worryin’ somethin’ had happened to you, and I couldn’t stop…”

“I’m fine,” he says reassuringly. “We’re all fine. It was just a supply run… Nobody shot at us. Not even with Mal’s talent for that.”

Slowly but insistently, she’s pushing him back towards the bulkhead, and when his shoulders meet the metal she pushes herself against him firmly and kisses him, her hands going under his t-shirt, her tongue bold and demanding. He’s startled, and a little unnerved; her libido has bounced back to its usual healthy state since she got past the first trimester tiredness and nausea, but it’s not like her to be so pushy in the middle of the day, and it’s hard for him to switch out of doctor mode quite that quickly.

“Kaylee! Kaylee, hey, what’s gotten into you? I’m supposed to be unloading, I was…”

“I need you,” she says in a small voice. Her eyes are huge and damp and fixed on him. Her breasts are heavy and full, and moving with her rapid breathing; her belly is a solid curve. His breath is already coming short.

“I need you too,” he says, his voice sounding thick to his own ears. “God, Kaylee, your body…”

She attacks him and crushes her mouth to his, and game over, she wins. He lifts her quickly, and presses her against the opposite wall; he can still do that, she’s still light in his arms. She wraps her legs quickly around his waist. Her hands are already busy, but they’ve got to fight his pulling off her shirt. Her bras don’t fit anymore, so there isn’t one, and his mouth is on her within seconds. She’s arching and moaning, she’s greedy as ever, and wrestling her own pants down, kicking them off one ankle.

They haven’t got enough room to manoevre against the wall, not any more, so he shifts her quickly to sitting on the bureau, yanks her hips towards him, and is in her brutally fast. She doesn’t care. She can’t get any leverage to move against him, and she’s expressing her opinion of his pace with her nails in his back, but she’s got to lean back a little now, and there’s nothing she can do. He grins, and slows down more, presses his hand between them, finds her clit until she’s arching awkwardly and wailing like a kitten. He can feel her tightening, drawing to a point, and he lets it build, finds the very edge, her drawing tight like a noose...

...and stops dead, pulled in hard, as deep as he can go. She hisses, actually hisses, and pulls at him desperately, and the sheer exhilaration of keeping her balanced on the edge makes him laugh out loud.

His own control turns him on the more, and he bites her shoulder as she claws at him frantically, come _on,_ Simon, _húndàn_ , please, I hate you, move…

They’re long, long seconds, locked together, long enough to let her climax ebb away, enough that she’ll have to work just a little to get it back. Then he pulls out and back in again, fast, and one of them makes a harsh sound in the back of the throat, her nails are vicious in his hair now, and he’s going to get it in the neck from both Mal and Jayne when he shows up in the cargo bay again looking rumpled. She pulls his hair. He digs his fingers into her hips and yanks her legs higher. The noise she makes as her pelvis tilts back might be a sob.

Hard stop. Her chest is heaving, her heels drumming at the small of his back. Fuck, Simon, _tāmāde,_ please, oh God, please…

She’ll wait for it. She’ll wait. He means for her to sleep after this, or at least to be thoroughly wrung out. He’ll hold for as long as it takes. As long as it takes…

It’s slow when he moves again, and she’s too desperate to protest, too awkwardly positioned to fight. She urges him on weakly with her heels, her lips, as he mouths at her neck, and lets himself find his own ragged edge, his hunger. His thumb is strokingstrokingstroking between them, until finally he lets it come, the tension in her body crest and then ebb away as she spasms round him, as he crashes over the edge into her and she holds him tight. He lifts her gently off the bureau and straight into bed; her eyes are already closing. Something shifts under his hand on her belly. He covers her up, kisses her forehead, climbs the ladder, rebuckling his belt.

Jayne will say “Li’l Kaylee in need of some… doctorin’, then?”, and snigger.

Mal will give him a hard stare, and punish him later.

Zoe will say nothing at all.

For some reason the first time, in the engine room, is vivid as it was at the time, a memory that unfurls…

\-----------------------

She’s in front of him, suddenly, her eyes shadowed and promising and absolutely focused, and he knows what’s going to happen when her hands settle on his waist and she tips her head back. She’s been patient, he supposes; he’d been laid up, fuzzy with pain meds, her ship had needed her, but her eyes are saying she’s done with being patient now. He can take a hint. He drops the wrench.

It’s slow, almost sleepy, at first, but when her arms snake round his neck then his gather her in, of their own accord, and her body is against him and rounded and slick and quicksilver in his arms. The nerve endings of his chest are telling him that those are her nipples, already hard, and divided from him only by a single layer of flimsy fabric, and somehow this has got away from him already. His cock is a rigid length against her, and one of them makes a muffled moan, and then her hands are pulling him down…

All she’s wearing is a tiny camisole, and his hands, acting on their own, simply push it up and latch onto one of her breasts, and she knocks her head backwards against the hard floor and makes a tight throaty sound. Her hands are everywhere, he can’t keep track of her hands. His mouth is on a nipple, he’s not sure which one of them did that, and she’s lifting her hips and dragging her own coveralls off one leg, and the bite of the cold steel floor up through his knees and the lingering knot of ache in his gut is being drowned out by soft, hot, ohgod _wet_ , and her hands are fumbling with his fly buttons and then simply dragging his pants and underwear as far down his legs as she can. Her hands are on his hips now, frantic, tugging down, down; slow’s for later, Simon, you made me wait so long, need you now, Simon, _now_ -

When he pushes into her, with all the steadiness he can muster, she breathes out, out, out, and then laughs, as though something is gone, something fallen away. He can’t move. He can’t breathe.

“Oh,” he says stupidly, to the hilt in her. “Oh, that’s. Oh.”

“Simon,” she says underneath him, just a thread of sound

“Oh God,” he says, in a voice he last remembers owning when he was nine, “you’re so wet.”

He can’t think, can’t get it together, but she clasps her legs tight round his hips, and arches her back and pushes _up,_ and his mind is a blizzard of white noise, but his hips know what to do can’t help it as he pulls out and pushes in again can’t help it and she keens - 

Her hands are slipping in the sweat across his shoulderblades and she’s tight and pulsing around him and both of them are well beyond words. He should do more, he should do - something - but his rhythm is falling apart already and she won’t stop and she’s shivering in a way that lights his nerves like fire, and he muffles himself in the soft crook of her neck and closes his eyes and gives in to the inevitable.

A future is starting to reassert itself, one in which the floor is hard and cold and Kaylee is lying on it with his not inconsiderable weight on top of her, and he can’t seem to get his shit together to lift himself up, and his belly hurts, and they will have to get up, achy and sticky, and awkwardly pull their clothing up from round their ankles and meet each other’s eyes and he will have to say something. Maybe if he kisses her more, touches her some, he can get hard again and they can do it some more and not get up, ever. Maybe Mal will storm in and throw him out of the airlock. He can only hope.

“I was going. To do that. Differently,” he manages, into the saltdamp flesh of her throat.

“No,” she says to the universe in general.

“I was going - “

“ _No_ ,” she says again, more sharply, and he gets his head up to look at her. They catch each other’s eyes full, and both of their breath sticks in their throats, and _wo de ma_ , suddenly he’s not kidding about that getting hard again thing.

“Stop doin’ that,” she says, but quieter. “Just… needed you, real bad. Nothin’ else. Just you.”

“But I -”

“Shut up.” She pushes him off her, but there’s a playful light in her eyes. “Got no time for this. Where’s my shoes? You comin’ back to my bunk, or what?”

When he straggles down the ladder into her bunk, still feeling like his knees are only loosely related to each other, she pushes him affectionately across the room and onto the bed. 

“We’re here now,” she says. “Take your clothes off.”

“Kaylee…”

She tilts her head and smoulders at him just a little. “...Please? Ain’t nobody comin’ in here, and I gotta see…”

Slowly, awkwardly, he pulls the shirt over his head again, starts to unfasten his belt. Kaylee adds her enthusiastic participation, until he’s kicked his pants down his legs again and she’s pushed his shoulders down onto the bed and straddled his hips, still fully dressed, her eyes alert and appraising.

“Oh,” she says softly. “Oh, that’s real nice, real worth seeing…”

He can’t stop his face heating, the colour spreading across his chest and down. She catches his chin and turns his face back to look at hers.

“Ain’t nothin’ here to be ashamed of,” she says. “Nothin’ at all. Not a thing in the ‘verse…”

\---------

For all the risk and the low-grade annoyance and discomfort, there’s a kind of boyish joy to this life. Running, hiding, fighting, aiming his gun, the one that’s acknowledged as his now, so even Jayne just hands it to him without comment when they’re saddling up. The path he was supposed to take was laid out in front of him so clearly on Osiris that nobody had to actually _tell_ him what the expectations were; they were there in every teacher’s appraisal, every dinner with his parents, every line encoded into the culture about the role of an eldest son. Go up the ranks at the hospital, bit by bit, always a little faster than the rest; find a girl of good family, date for an acceptable amount of time, an engagement. Formal events with both families to seal the deal. A large and expensive wedding. Children, at least one, preferably two or more, at neatly spaced intervals; his wife can give up work, or carry on if she chooses, but too much ambition in a wife isn’t considered seemly. Questioning it, and the ease with which it was laid in front of him, would have been like questioning gravity. Self-conscious with women as he’d always been, there were enough of them who were willing to make it easy for him, although he has no illusions that they craved his sparkling personality. River had never fitted somehow - he certainly couldn’t imagine her growing up into the coiffed, polished model of their mother - but he had supposed vaguely that she’d find her niche in physics somehow and settle close to him. 

If he’s stepped away from River and towards Kaylee, it’s because River has let him. He said to Mal only what had to be said, about where his allegiance lay. He knows his choices dwindled to none the day he became aware he was responsible for more lives than he thought - before that, even, when something too small to see melded with something barely perceptible and started a chain reaction as unstoppable as the ‘verse. If he ever has to make that choice. If he has to.

Maybe, he is starting to think, it doesn’t matter what skin the surgeon wears, as long as he is still the surgeon, as long as his skill comes at the call. Maybe, even, the surgeon is just a skin the man wears. It’s a theory.

One way or another, he will figure this out. The clock is ticking.


	5. Awakenings

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eyes are opened.

Dad had come to pick him up from school. That never happens. Dad is at work in the afternoons.

“Dad? Where’s Noelle?”

“What, you aren’t glad to see your old father? I came to get you. Noelle has the afternoon off.” 

“Oh. Hi, dad.”

“Hi, son. Let’s go.”

“Where are we going?”

Dad had shouldered his briefcase and smiled mysteriously. “It’s a special day.”

“Yeah, but where are we going?”

“ _Lái_ [ _rì_ ](https://www.chinasage.info/chinese-characters.htm#XL97) _fāng cháng._ Get your things. The car is waiting.”

He’d hurried. You don’t argue with that tone.

The ride had been dull. Dad had been checking his handheld CorVue for messages. He’s been into the centre of Capital City many times, been to the museums, the teahouses, the stores. His favorite is the botanical gardens. Just once last winter, Hua-Li had taken him there in the snow and let him walk in it until he wanted to stop. Then she helped him make a small snowman behind a clump of trees where the guards couldn’t see them. He dripped on the rug in the drawing room and Mother made her sad face.

They’re pulling up to the hospital. He’s only been here once, and he doesn’t remember it too well. He remembers the smell, sort of sharp and clean and like what you can smell before it rains. Kind of complicated and dangerous and interesting. “Is this about Mother?”

Dad smiles smugly. “Now, why would it be about Mother?”

“And the baby? Dad,” he says, sitting up straight, “did Mother have the baby?”

Dad smiles even wider and swings open the aircar door. “Let’s go and find out.”

There are so many people around, in different uniforms. And white gowns. Some of the nurses smile at him. They think he’s younger than he is, he knows. He hates being small. He hates the school uniform. 

They turn left. The rooms are getting nicer, and the patients younger. Women like Mother instead of older people. Then there’s one last corridor and there is Mother, in one of those gowns and in a big bed, with a pink thing in her arms all wrapped in blankets.

She doesn’t look up, doesn’t look at him, but she smiles. “Hello, darling,” she says, looking at the thing in her arms. “There’s someone here for you to meet.”

“Go on, son, go and sit beside your mother.” Dad nudges him with his hip.

He drops his bookbag in the door of the room without thought and goes. A baby. The baby. He’s been thinking about this day since they told him. A real brother or sister.

Mother shifts over in the big bed and pats the space beside her; he hoists himself up. It’s high, much higher than a normal bed, and it bends up at the back. There are lots of pillows.

“Here.” Dad arranges a pillow in his lap and gives a secret look to Mother. “Hold your arms out.”

He holds his arms out, and Mother puts the bundle in them. It’s heavier than he thought. There’s a little head, with dark hair under a knit hat, and closed eyes, and a tiny little mouth all scrunched up. The arms and legs are all wrapped up in the blanket. It’s like an alien, like something he’s never seen before. 

“This is your sister,” says Mother, smiling at him all gooey, and he feels a stab of indignation. A _girl?_

There’s a clicking noise; Dad is suddenly holding a capture. He never does things like that. He forces a smile, knowing it’s required of him. He looks at the thing again.

She has long lashes, long dark lashes, and a tiny little nose. Her mouth is pursed up like she’s dreaming baby dreams, and she’s all pink, like she’s too hot. He touches her face, not really knowing what to do, and her eyes flutter and then open. They’re dark, dark blue, and they look like they really see him. He can’t look away.

“You’re a big brother now,” says Dad, from his place by the door. “It’s your job to take care of her. You will take care of her, won’t you, son?”

He isn’t really listening to them, not properly, because she’s telling him something herself, already. She’s telling him that things are different now. That she waited for him to come. That she does see him.

“What’s she called?” he says to Mother, without looking away.

“We didn’t have a girl’s name picked out,” says Mother, and she sounds all worn down, but also happy. “What do you think? Would you like to name her, darling?”

He looks into the dark blue and knows where he saw that colour before. In the botanical gardens, where it had melted away the ice, where it was running fast and free. He tried to jump over it and fell in up to his ankles, and Hua-Li laughed all of a sudden, then gasped and clapped a hand over her mouth, but he couldn’t stop laughing too, and she started again, and then she fell down in the snow laughing until he splashed out with his feet numb and his teeth chattering. She bought him hot chocolate at the kiosk and made him promise not to tell.

“River,” he hears himself say. “I think her name is River.”

Hua-Li had left two months later to go back to school and his parents had shaken their heads. _So young_ , they said. _We should never._

He can feel Dad frowning and opening his mouth to say something, but Mother looks at him in that way she has that shuts him up. “River,” she says. “That’s beautiful, Simon. Little River. _Měilì de xīn mèimei_ . _”_

She wraps her arm around his shoulders and squeezes him towards her. He holds on tight to River. She likes her name, he knows. She’s come to help him, to be with him. To teach him what he needs to know. They’ll be together. River and Simon. Simon and River.

“Why don’t you come with me for some ice cream?” says Dad, too cheerfully. He can never seem to remember how old Simon is now. He’s fidgeting with his pocket again. Wants to be on his CorVue.

“Sure, Dad.” He goes to pass River back to Mother, but she shakes her head, and puts the baby down in a plastic see-through crib beside the bed. River in a fish tank. 

Dad offers his hand and tows him down the corridor. “We’ll get something to eat and then go home and do your homework, okay?”

“Sure, Dad,” he says again. He looks back at the room. Mother is lying down in the bed and is trying to go to sleep. But River, he is sure, is awake. 

\---------------------

Kaylee opens her eyes.

Her hips hurt. Her back hurts. She has to pee. She sighs, and yanks the pillow out from between her knees. Pushes off the back of the bulkhead until she can sit up.

Simon is lying on the edge of the bed with his back to her, and he’s just a little bit too still to be convincing. But that isn’t a conversation she wants to have right now, so she shuffles herself down the bed until she can slip off the end. Sticks her feet in her boots - no point even trying to reach the laces - and hauls herself up the ladder. 

Simon’s doing everything he should be doing. He rubs her back. He helps her up. He’d check her every day if she wanted, or if she let him. He fixed up Jayne’s arm. Sewed the cut in Zoe’s side, from that run-in with Ishimura- _san_. He doctors River, spends time with her. Puts up with Mal and Jayne needling him. She doesn’t think they’ve noticed anything, except maybe Inara, and River. But every day he’s a little less… there.

And Zoe. Zoe will have noticed. She watches, Kaylee knows. Looks and doesn’t look away, like she’s sticking her hand in a flame, drawing a knife along her skin. Kaylee has a pretty good idea, why Zoe has to hurt herself on them, why she says less and less to anyone but Mal. At first she wanted to go to Zoe, to comfort her, and Inara made her stop. But that isn’t Simon’s trouble, thinking of Zoe, she is pretty sure. 

There are so many conversations she could have with him. So much she wants to say, about the baby, about how scared she is, about what is wrong with him, why he’s tying himself in knots inside again and won’t let her in. Is he really so scared of being a daddy? She can’t make sense of it. She’s never been afraid, not about him, because she saw him with River. Knew how patient and how caring he could be, even when he was being driven stone crazy, before they ever went to bed. 

Captain won’t let her near the engine anymore, and she can’t fit under it anyways, but she won’t be getting back to sleep anytime soon, and she’s hungry. She makes herself a cup of tea in the galley after her trip to the head, and sits down heavily. It’s at times like this she wishes she liked to read, like Simon does, and not just tinker. Cap needs the Mule fixed up some, though. That’ll hold her, later.

She could fold the clothes, the little clothes. And daydream about what’s going to happen. Not long now. The baby pushes a foot out hard, and she rubs at it, still looking at the passage to the engine room. 

She could yell at him, again. Poke his sore spots until he gets all riled and yells back. But she doesn’t think he will, not right now, or he’ll be worse afterwards and take it all back. And she just doesn’t have the energy. She could ask River. But he’d never forgive her. And she can’t be always asking a psychic what is up with her man. Even if River would tell her. Even if she is his sister.

He’s gonna snap sometime. Sooner or later. Kaylee can’t stop it. And she can’t fix it either. She has enough problems of her own.

\------------------------------------

Mal walks the stairs down to the lower deck. It’s late, very late, and even River has gone to bed, but he can’t settle. He’d like to drop by Inara’s shuttle, maybe sling a few barbs and work off some of his tension, but she might actually throw something at him if he stormed in now. So he paces the deck. Military stride. Fourteen measured places through the galley. Ten paces from the aft hatch of the galley to the stairs. Twenty-four stairs, twenty-seven paces across the cargo bay to the passenger dorm hatch.

The infirmary is half-lit. That’s unsettling. Doc is meticulous about the place, and he don’t do things like forget to switch off lights. Nobody sleeps down in the passenger dorm now but River, when she sleeps, and the last thing she’d do is mess around in there. He stops by the door and peers. There’s a dark splotch on one of the counters, which as his eyes adjust eventually resolves itself into a mess of dark hair. The doc, of course. (Boy needs a haircut in the worst way.)

He jerks the lights to full, and the head shoots up, then nearly overbalances and falls off its stool.

“Kid. The hell you doing in here? Go to bed.”

The doc is blinking like something dragged out of a cave. “I was asleep.”

“You got a bunk. _Kuài zǒu kāi_ already, Kaylee’ll kill you.”

“She needs the space.” Kid folds a foot under himself and studies his fingernails. “She doesn’t need me there.”

Mal considers some kind of fatherly “women, huh” gesture, then discards it. It’s too late, and what does he know about this type of thing, anyway?, and this ain’t his circus, and -

“Fine. Just get out of here, _mǎ shàng_ . Go sleep in your old room or somethin’. Fall asleep on the gorram job, and _I’ll_ kill you. Now git.”

Doc gets up and leaves without another word.

Mal kills the lights again on his way out. He feels less like sleeping than he did fifteen minutes ago, and it’s a few hours yet until Zoe’ll be up. He feels the familiar ache in his gut for Zo, and the pride. Now there’s someone who knows how to keep her problems inside, where they belong, and not spill them all over the ship. Not like some.

It’s too late for whiskey, too early for tea. That feels like it should be a proverb. Is there a proverb? He lurches back to the bridge for some contemplation until his first mate or his pilot gets up to talk to.

\-------------------------------

Kaylee is five days past due and the whole ship is on a knife edge.

They haven’t gone much of anywhere in the past few weeks. Mal struck a deal with an off-books doctor of an old associate’s on Persephone, and they’ve stayed within an eight-hour radius of the planet since Kaylee got within a few weeks of due. It suits Inara, if she’s honest. She can take the shuttle out for long engagements planetside, which are a necessity to turn a profit since Mal’s antics in the past year have cut her client base there down considerably. And it’s the closest the crew has ever had to a home base - rich enough to offer margins, raggedy enough to offer opportunities, and the Alliance presence is uneven enough for the Tams to weave through it, with a little creativity.

Kaylee’s been tired and uncomfortable, but still Kaylee; she’s aglow with excitement and anticipation, she can’t be contained, and with each day she just gets more certain that she’s a day closer to meeting her baby. 

Simon, on the other hand, has been looking worse by the day; he’s red-eyed, and spends more and more of his time reorganising and cleaning the infirmary. Mal’s told her that he found him sleeping in the infirmary and kicked him out, but wherever he’s sleeping now, it doesn’t seem to be in his bunk. She made him tea, and sat beside him, and smiled encouragingly, but he grew up with these silent fencing games, he knows how to play. He drank the tea, and complimented her on it, and politely parried her to a standstill. He’s as unbending as Mal. Kaylee knows how badly he is doing, no doubt, and she must have her reasons for letting this play out, even if Inara can’t at this moment quite imagine what they are.

Right now she can see them both in the infirmary, along with the doctor. The other doctor. Mal went down to the surface for him in a shuttle about eight hours ago, after Simon told him it was time, and the crew have been finding excuses ever since to wander through the passenger dorm. Simon closed the door, but he didn’t obscure the windows, and she can see the both of them, and the other doctor - what was his name again, anyway? - pacing, kneeling, bending over Kaylee. River disappeared several hours ago, and Inara’s not altogether surprised - whatever she’s experiencing from within the infirmary can only be painful and difficult for her to process, with the tools she has. Zoe is standing with her back to the bulkhead and her arms folded near the hatch to the cargo bay, and her face is unreadable. Jayne is hovering near the stairs, and keeps making abortive lunges towards the window. Mal is on the bridge. Of course.

Kaylee’s wearing an oversized old t-shirt and socks. She looks like a child, sweaty with stringy hair, like somebody stuck the huge swell under her t-shirt onto her. It still seems unreal. Her _mèimei_ can’t be a mother. Her face is as red and tear-stained as any child’s.

Simon comes out of the infirmary for a moment, and at the same moment Mal comes barrelling down the stairs from the upper deck. His face hardens when he sees Simon, and the two of them come face to face at the bottom of the stairs. Inara feels her muscles tense, and shoots a glance over her shoulder at Zoe, who hasn’t moved.

“Doctor.” Mal crosses his arms. “How’s Kaylee?”

Simon’s voice is saturated with weariness. “I don’t know, Mal. She’s okay for the moment, I guess. It’s going to be a few more hours.”

Mal is vibrating with impotence and anger; Inara feels the familiar twist in her own gut, somewhere between affection and deep, deep frustration. “You see that she stays that way, _dǒng ma_?”

Simon just stares at him. 

Mal stomps away, a tiny frustrated tyrant, and Inara’s caught somewhere between wanting to chase him for comfort and wanting to slap him very hard. He can never be open, never say what he needs, never just admit that he _cares_ -

She shakes herself. This isn’t about Mal.

Simon is soon back from whatever it was he went to get, and he blanks out the windows when he goes back into the infirmary. Inara finds her way to the couch eventually, and dozes off, hearing faintly the noises of Kaylee moaning and crying out, Simon’s voice low and intimate, the doctor’s voice.

Then there’s a sharp cry.

Inara jerks awake. Jayne has disappeared, but Zoe is there, and she’s come off the wall, and her face is… _something._

The cry again from inside. It’s unmistakable.

Inara fumbles her way towards the wall, and she’s smiling, the relief bone-deep. They made it - 

It’s a long series of minutes before Doctor - Radnor, Inara remembers now, it’s Radnor - emerges from the infirmary, and he’s smiling faintly. “All fine, I think,” he says. “If you could inform Captain Reynolds that I’ll be needing shuttled back onto the planet - “

Zoe’s stepping forward to deal with him, and with her usual uncanny prescience River is drifting through the door to the cargo bay, and Inara is stepping forward to the open infirmary doorway where she can see Kaylee propped up in the chair with a bundle in her arms, a smile of relief and congratulation all over her face, when she sees Simon sink to his knees and bury his face in Kaylee’s lap.

Inara bolts around in the doorway and shoos River away. “Not now, sweetie,” she says, drawing the door almost to. “I think they need a minute.” River cocks an inquisitive glance at her from under her brows, but she draws well back and settles on the couch, doodling on a piece of paper she extracted from somewhere. Inara should close the door all the way, she should move away, she should give them this time -

“Oh, honey,” Kaylee says, her voice full of warm concern. “What is it?”

Simon’s voice is thick and muffled; Inara knows without looking that his shoulders will be shaking. “I’ve been - so afraid -”

“Of what?”

Inara hears a sob. “I don’t know - of - letting you down - not being enough - not being able to help you both - “

“But you did,” Kaylee says reassuringly. “We’re fine, look. Look at him, he’s right here. Ain’t he perfect?”

A choked laugh. “Yes. Yes he is. You were amazing.”

“What’re we gonna call him? He’s gotta have a name. Can’t just call him baby for long.”

Simon sounds a lot less muffled; he must have raised his head. “I don’t know - I didn’t - I could never really believe that he’d actually come. What do you think we should call him?”

“Dunno.” Kaylee actually giggles. “I guess we gotta work that one out.”

“You should rest,” says Simon, and Inara hears the noise of a kiss. “You really need to rest - you’ve been doing this for hours - you’ve lost blood - “

“I’m fine, honey. But you should take him to meet everybody. I can’t believe River hasn’t busted in here already, she’s gotta be chomping at the bit.”

“That’s a good idea,” says Simon quietly. “I’ll take him - just for a minute - you rest. He’ll need to feed again - I’ll bring him back.”

Inara scuttles rapidly away from the door, feeling the grin spreading over her face. Jayne has materialised from somewhere, drawn by whatever sixth sense he usually only displays in sensing the presence of food; there are feet outside on the catwalk, probably Mal. Her family is coming together to welcome a new one of their own.

When Simon stumbles out of the infirmary, he looks like only willpower is keeping him on his feet; his clothes are bloodstained and his eyes are dark-ringed. But he’s carrying in his arms, with infinite care, a soft pink bundle.

Inara releases a soft gasp, seeing fingers, eyes, nose, a dark downy head. “Oh, Simon,” she says. “It’s wonderful.”

“This is, um.” Simon smiles back at her. “Baby boy Tam, I guess. For now.”

River has materialised at Simon’s elbow, and she’s grinning like a loon. “I told you,” she says, reaching out to trace a finger over the closed eyelids and tiny snub nose. “He told you. He knows what his name is already. You never listen. He’s so peaceful. His thoughts are a song.” Simon doesn’t have a free arm, but he leans against River gratefully and kisses the top of her head.

Jayne clears his throat awkwardly, alerting them all to the fact he’s hovering six feet away. “I c’n, uh. Hold him for a second, Doc, if’n you need to go do somethin’”.

Simon stares at Jayne, and his thoughts are clearly somewhere along the lines of “over my dead body”. “I don’t really think that will be necessary, Jayne.”

Jayne looks more hurt than Inara had ever thought him capable of. “Fine. Di’nt have no need to hold your rugrat anyway. ‘Scuse me if I was tryin’ to help you out.”

Inara rolls her eyes. “Oh, _nǐmen dōu shì báichī_ _._ He isn’t going to hurt the baby, Simon. Don’t be ridiculous. I’m sure Jayne knows how to hold a baby, don’t you?” 

“Damn straight,” says Jayne gruffly, and he looks unusually gratified at her support. “Got six littl’uns younger than me, in my ma’s house. Held one for her many a time.”

Inara smiles at him and stares expectantly at Simon, who slowly lowers the baby into Jayne’s arms. Jayne wraps one big hand carefully under the head, earning him a gratefully surprised glance. “See?” he says. “Ain’t nothin’ to it. Babies ain’t so hard.” The baby whimpers quietly, and he jiggles it with an experienced air. 

Mal has come up behind them through the cargo bay door without her hearing him, and startles her suddenly. “Well,” he says, with his eyes fixed on her warmly, “ain’t that a sight to see.”

Simon, without the baby in his arms, has sat down rather suddenly on the couch, and Inara can see that she is needed, as she will always be needed, if she lets herself be. “Simon,” she says, “why don’t you rest for a while? I’ll hold the baby. I can bring him back to you or Kaylee if he needs anything.”

Simon looks grateful, but she can see that his desire to close his eyes is warring with his conviction that nobody else can possibly be trusted to watch the baby closely enough. “Thank you, but I - “

She cuts him off. “You’re going to have to learn to accept help. You need to rest. Kaylee needs to rest. I’ll be right here.”

Simon rubs at his eyes uncertainly and then slowly stretches out across the length of the couch. Jayne hands over the infant, stands with his hands hanging loosely for a second, and then shuffles off towards the upper deck. River smiles knowingly at Inara, picks up her drawing paper, and drifts off after him. Mal smiles at her and heads back towards the cargo bay, no doubt to fly the doctor back down to the surface. And then there’s just Kaylee, slumbering in the infirmary, and Simon, breathing deeply on the couch. And Inara, pacing the empty space and humming a half-remembered tune.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The coda to this story will go up very soon. Thanks for reading.


	6. Coda: [erase]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [stop][erase]

Simon balances the capture on the shelf on the other side of the bunk with his right hand. Alex is held against his chest with his left arm, sound asleep, for now. Kaylee is passed out on the bed, out of shot. She’d be furious if she knew he was doing this, but he doesn’t expect her to wake for anything, short of Alex crying, any time soon. Alex doesn’t much like to be put down, and Kaylee has taken the brunt of that over the last few weeks. He looks down at the soft little skull with its dark fluff, lifts it gently to his lips.

Swipes at his tired eyes. Gathers the rags of himself. Hits Record.

“Hello, mother,” he says. “Hello, father. I trust you’ve been well. You might find it hard to remember by now, but my name is Si - ”

No, stop. No good. If he says his full name, the ident software in the Cortex will be able to pick it up before it ever gets anywhere. He can’t get sloppy with this. He crosses the room to the capture and hits Stop, then Erase.

Time to try again. “Hello, Gabriel,” he says. “Hello, Regan. I trust you remember who I am. Rest assured that I and your other child, you remember that one, are quite well, under the circumstances. Of course, your other child will never be sane again after what was done to her, but I take care of her. We’ve found a safe place to be, and I - “

He looks down at Alex’s head, cupped in the palm of his hand. “This is my son,” he says. “You won’t be meeting him, but I thought you might want to know that he exists. That things have gone on for me. I’ve changed, you don’t know what I’ve done now. What I’ve had to do. I’ve…”

Stop. No. Even if he can get the recording into the system untraceably, he has to assume that the security services will be crawling all over it within half an hour of it landing at the estate. The more he loses his head, the more he tells them, the more they’ll have to go on in tracking them down. If he talks too long, their best forensic analysts can probably ID the ship within a fairly narrow margin just by what they can see of the bunk. He sighs, and hits Erase again. Sits down on the edge of the bed, carefully, so as not to jostle Kaylee. This is a bad idea. He reaches out and traces his free hand over her hair.

He doesn’t know where they are, really. There’s been no time, and they are too busy keeping Alex alive. But the fear, the paralysing fear, has receded. He can look at her without seeing every way he can fail written all over her face and her body. 

Mal had walked by them, in the common area, yesterday. Kaylee had fallen asleep feeding Alex, and he was carefully extracting him from her arms. Then Mal had clattered down the stairs, and shot him a look of intense but silent poison. And he’d lost his temper.

“Has it ever occurred to you that I could love her as much as you do? Or more?”

Mal contemplated him through narrowed eyes. “Truth be told, I can’t say it has,” he said, and walked away.

Kaylee has talked Mal into visiting Farraday, where her parents are, in a few weeks’ time, since they’re going as close to it as New Melbourne anyway. So that she can introduce Alex to them. He is happy for her.

Even if things were very, very different, Kaylee could never meet his parents. He can imagine it with such vividness that in some ways it would be a relief to live through it. The almost imperceptible winces, the glances at each other, at every “knowed” and “we was”. The tone of his mother’s voice, milk-sweet, as she said, “My goodness, that  _ does _ sound interesting.” And Kaylee, glowing with light and generosity, so happy to be meeting kind folks who take an interest. And himself, boiling with acid and hating absolutely everyone.

They will never imagine, he knows, that his life could have moved on. That he could have changed. That things didn’t just stop dead for him when he walked away from the Fed security station. That there might be any place in the ‘Verse where the social training of the upper-class Core doesn’t equip you perfectly for every situation. To them, he is no doubt frozen at twenty-four, naive, headstrong, deluded, lost. Alone.

He’s made his bed. He’s made his choices. He’s burned his bridges, and good riddance to them. But - 

He hits Record again. “Hello, mother,” he says. “Hello, father. I trust I don’t need to introduce myself. I just thought you should know that I’m alive, I’m very hard to kill, and your other child too. She’ll never recover from what you let them do to her, but she’s safe. This is my son, I have a son. You will never meet him, and you’ll never meet his mother, you don’t have the right - “

No. This will never work. Too angry, he’ll give too much up, he’s making it too clear what his vulnerabilities are. He jiggles Alex a little higher, wipes his hand across his face, and hits Erase.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading, and for any and all feedback; a metapost about the what and why of this story can be read [ at my LJ](https://shiva-goddessof.livejournal.com/2980.html).


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